ABSTRACT This article examines how Pakistan's local government gender quota policy, aimed at improving women's political representation, has been undermined by entrenched patriarchal structures in rural Punjab. Based on longitudinal ethnographic research, including fieldwork conducted in 2005-2006 and 2019, with follow-up observations in 2024, the study highlights the problem of proxy representation. In this scenario, elected women often act as figurehead councilors while their male relatives wield actual decision-making power. The analysis indicates that the apparent increase in female representation often amounts to mere symbolic inclusion, offering little genuine empowerment for women. By drawing on feminist theories of representation and agency, along with concepts of patriarchal bargains and a governmentality perspective, the article argues that state-led “empowerment” reforms can be co-opted and reshaped by local kinship norms concerning honor and authority. In practice, rather than fundamentally disrupting male dominance, Pakistan’s gender quota has largely been transformed into a new form of patriarchy—one that maintains male control while creating a façade of female representation. These findings contribute to discussions on feminist governance by illustrating that efforts to democratize gender relations must confront deeply entrenched social structures.

ABSTRACT This article examines the shifting dynamics of Uyghur diaspora activism, tracing its trajectory from widespread silence before 2017 to a surge of family-centered mobilization between 2017 and 2020, followed by a subsequent ebb and re-fragmentation. We argue that family has simultaneously functioned as the Chinese state’s most effective lever of transnational repression and the diaspora’s most effective tool of activist mobilization. Threats to relatives at home created a climate of fear that silenced Uyghurs abroad; yet the sudden severing of contact with family after 2017 undermined that control and compelled thousands to speak out. This rupture precipitated the emergence of a family-centric form of campaigning that altered the global visibility of the Uyghur issue and legitimacy of Uyghur activism within and beyond the diaspora. Since 2020, the resumption of tightly monitored contact with family members has re-muted many voices, even as others remain engaged. This arc in Uyghur political mobilization offers insights into how family ties can simultaneously constrain and propel diaspora activism – an area that remains understudied – and foregrounds the intimate scales through which transnational repression operates and diaspora activism can emerge and take shape.

ABSTRACT The increasing awareness in China of migrant workers’ rights and the shortcomings of the judicial system have created opportunities for grassroots legal practitioners. This paper examines their emergence and survival in South China within the context of Chinese labor politics. Based on nine months of field observations at two grassroots law organizations and thirty-five interviews with grassroots legal practitioners, this research reveals that grassroots legal practitioners face challenges not only from competition with licensed lawyers and legal aid groups but also from changing labor politics that constrain rights advocacy. In response, grassroots legal practitioners have adopted strategies such as distancing themselves from labor NGOs, maintaining relationships with local government officials and courts, and collaborating with licensed law firms. This paper contributes to the scholarship on the transformation of labor politics in China and deepens understanding of legal practices associated with migrant workers in contemporary Chinese society.

ABSTRACT State discourse in China is often less about generating belief than it is about reproducing the political leadership’s symbolic hegemony over normative truth claims. This study analyzes hegemony-making discourse as a system of intertextual conventions characterized by the public’s lack of belief in the discursive contents, discursive securitization, and sycophantic citations that produce a language game between leaders and their subordinates. This paper investigates the changing approach of China’s central government to state discourses in Hong Kong from the 1980s to the present. These changes have been accelerated by legal and political changes in Hong Kong and its relationship with the central government since 2019. Offering explanations for these shifts at the structural, interpretive, coalitional, and strategic levels, this study evaluates the benefits and vulnerabilities of the Chinese government’s new discursive approach to Hong Kong in the years since the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement (Anti-ELAB movement).

ABSTRACT Why is there sometimes limited mobilization against autocratization, particularly when it involves major human rights violations? Some scholars emphasize the loss of political space through repression as the major cause while others emphasize strategic considerations such as divisions and abandonment of moderate tactics. A third view stresses popular support for strongman rule. Viewed in this light, the weakness of pushback against Rodrigo Duterte, Philippine president from 2016 to 2022, presents a challenge to existing theories. Despite the bloody “war on drugs” during his presidency, there was no violent government crackdown on peaceful demonstrators, and centrists eventually coalesced with left-wing activists around moderate strategies. But public backing for Duterte does not explain how he was able to defuse popular outrage over drug war killings, particularly after the high-profile police murders of several minors. This paper offers a relational explanation utilizing competing framing analysis. This better elucidates how, with Catholic bishops and community organizations politically weakened and international organizations denounced for interfering in domestic politics, Duterte was able to tactically outmaneuver his opponents and "frame" human rights advocates as coddling criminals while he protected law-abiding Filipinos.

ABSTRACT In the past few years, the online scam industry has undergone seismic changes. After emerging in Taiwan and mainland China in the 1990s, in the 2010s scam operations began to relocate servers and offices to Southeast Asia, especially Cambodia and the Philippines. While initially the majority of operations were small-scale and largely hosted in apartments, villas, and hotel rooms, in the second half of the decade they began to assume industrial dimensions, coalescing into bigger walled compounds often hosting dozens of companies, many staffed by workers held against their will and forced to perform scams. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and a set of in-depth interviews conducted with survivors of scam compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, this paper offers the first in-depth examination of the political economy of Southeast Asia’s scam industry, arguing that these operations should be framed as part of compound capitalism, a new manifestation of predatory capital.

ABSTRACT The existing literature on North Korea has been divided over whether the country’s state ideology of Juche should be regarded as a variant of Soviet Marxism-Leninism or whether the explicit voluntarism of Juche means that it should be viewed as a distinctive indigenous ideology. Drawing on Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development and Gramsci’s theory of ideology, the paper argues that North Korea’s status as a geopolitically insecure postcolonial country engaged in a forced march from “backwardness” to a modern industrialized economy has had a decisive impact on both the form and content of North Korean state ideology. Understood as a form of developmental nationalism that seeks not only to legitimize authoritarian rule but also to create a collective subjectivity suited the task of rapid catch-up national development, Juche constitutes a combined ideological form that rests on Marxist-Leninist origins but has deliberately drawn on existing forms of “common sense” conducive towards the mass mobilization of society. In doing so, this paper critically engages with the argument that the voluntarism of Juche represents a decisive break from the supposedly objective laws of Marxism and Marxism-Leninism, thereby “turning Marx on his head.”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgementsI thank Nicholas Khoo and Wang Kan for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.Notes1 Freedom House Citation2022.2 Lu et al Citation2017, 17.3 China Labor Bulletin Citation2022; AsiaNews Citation2022.4 The following discussion on Zhuang Liehong’s experience was based on accounts described in Lu et al Citation2017, 6-7.5 Lu et al Citation2017, 6.6 The reported number for the size of the land involved varies from approximately 500 acres to over 2,000 acres. Fewsmith Citation2012, 1; Mooney Citation2012; Lu et al Citation2017, 5.7 Economy Citation2011; Lu et al Citation2017, 5.8 Wang Citation2012.9 Bakken and Wang Citation2011, 253.10 Wang Citation2012.11 Huhe et al Citation2022.12 Associated Press Citation2022.13 Huhe et al Citation2022.14 O’Brien and Li Citation2006.15 O’Brien and Li Citation2006, 2-3.16 Dickson Citation2016.17 Chen Citation2012, 112-113.18 Dickson Citation2021, 150-151.19 Davidson and Yu Citation2022.20 O'Brien and Han Citation2009, 361-363.21 O’Brien and Han Citation2009, 373.22 Martinez-Bravo et al Citation2022; Loh Citation2022.23 Huhe et al Citation2022.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohn W. TaiJohn W. Tai is a professorial lecturer at The George Washington University and a China analyst. He is the author of Building Civil Society in Authoritarian China (Springer, 2015). He can be contacted at jwtai@gwu.edu.